Clients sometimes come to therapy to address behaviours they would like to feel more in control of - like drinking, drug-taking, over-working or disordered eating. These can creep up on us over time and start to feel out of control. Addictive behaviours can feel shameful and difficult to talk about with friends or family, and they can increasingly have a negative impact on our daily lives and relationships.

A counsellor can provide a non-judgemental and confidential space to explore some of these issues. Although it's not a quick fix, counselling can offer the opportunity to help with motivation, working out your triggers, how to cope with relapses and learn methods to manage life without resorting to unhelpful habits.

​Talking can help get to the roots of why you use certain substances or behaviours to excess and why it feels hard to let go. Your counsellor can help support you along the road to sobriety or just feeling more in control.

​Carl Rogers, a founder of the humanistic approach to psychology, said: ‘The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I change' (On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy).

Most clients seek counselling because they feel something is not quite right in their lives, and often they feel that that something is themselves. Exploring their thoughts and feelings, challenging those thoughts which are distorted and unhelpful, can lead to self-acceptance. This is not about escaping responsibility for the parts my clients play in their relationships, rather a self-compassionate understanding of how they came to be who they are. Such an understanding can create lasting, positive change.

Accepting ourselves includes forgiving ourselves, and can free us to fulfil our potential. The writer Maya Angelou wrote: “I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes - it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'Well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self.”

Self-acceptance gives us the freedom to get on with other things, instead of anxiously wishing we were somehow different than who we are.

​Do you have arguments with your partner, child, parent or co-worker which sometimes leave you feeling emotionally bruised or misunderstood? Talking through what happens in these conflicts with a counsellor, and working out whether they follow a familiar pattern, starts a process of trying to understand what is causing them to emerge in the first place. Growing understanding leads to a rise in self-awareness of these processes. This in turn enhances your ability to make changes for the better, nip conflicts in the bud or put the brakes on any escalation in the intensity of your arguments.

You may have sometimes felt you are getting into the ‘same old’ arguments which prick your anger or hurt in a familiar way. “Here we go again,” you might have said to yourself. Unpicking which emotions are under the surface during one of these arguments – are you feeling threatened, criticised, unloved, under-valued, abandoned, isolated, or unheard (or a combination of all of the above)? - can be surprising and enlightening. You can learn to identify these sort of conflict dialogues and work out what is really going on below the surface.

Looking at your past relationships may be one key to this. Trying to work out what your partner in the argument might be feeling can also guide you so that you may be able to stop the recurrence of these old arguments. When you have an argument with someone who is important to you, you may feel anxious about the potential breaking of your bond with this person. Some people worry less or more about potential threats to their relationships, usually due to what they have experienced with other significant relationships in their past (this is explored in the field of attachment theory). To lessen the fear of these perceived threats, a step back is needed, an attempt to stay calm and notice what emotions are being triggered in you.

When you are feeling calmer (in the counselling room, for example), your brain will allow you to think more clearly and we can discuss your instinctive reactions to arguments – do you lash out with angry words or clam up and retreat? - and what responses do your actions effect in others? What is really behind these types of reactions and responses? You may start to see there is hurt and longing behind superficial anger, for example. ​You can learn and practice phrases which help you feel more assertive and communicate more openly. You can build confidence in talking all these ideas through with a non-judgemental and supportive counsellor. And you can start to see yourself (and partner) in a more understanding and compassionate way, re-build trust where it is due, and be able to deal with conflicts as they arise in a more non-defensive and positive way.

Counselling can be a helpful place to gain some distance from an emotional battleground, in a non-judgemental relationship with someone who is not personally involved.